VIII
With a year’s furlough on half-pay, I bade farewell to my friends. I was in no hurry to get home, and therefore took a passage by the Cape steamer. We were connected with Cape Town by a service of two or three little steamers. One of them had just gone down in a storm while lying in harbour at the Cape, a fact which, had I known it, would probably have sent me home by the shorter and safer route. But it was a chance which might never offer itself again of seeing the Cape.
So we started in our cockle-shell. There was no place for stores of dead stock, no ice-rooms or anything of that sort; we had our sheep and our poultry stowed away in pens somewhere in the bows. We started with very fine weather, though in mid-winter, for South Africa; we put in at Durban, but not to land; we skirted along the coast then called No Man’s Land, where we saw the Caffres walking about; and we landed at Port Elizabeth, where we had time to look round. A man who could talk Caffre carried me off to show me a kraal. We found Port Elizabeth provided with fine stone warehouses, waiting for the trade of the future.
That evening it began to blow. Off the Cape of Good Hope—formerly the Cape of Torments—the wind is believed to blow harder and the sea to rise higher than in any other part of the globe. We proved that this belief is well founded. The night was unendurable in the cabin; two of us spent it in the small smoking-saloon for’ard, wrapped in a plaid. In the middle of the night a huge sea broke over the ship, smashed in the doors of the saloon and carried them out to sea; very luckily it did not carry us out to sea with the doors. When the day broke at last we found that all our live stock—our sheep and fowls, with their pens—had been carried away. The waves were mountainous. Presently there was a great shouting and whistling; the sea had torn up the engine room hatchway, and put out four of the five fires; a tarpaulin was rigged on hastily; but we had but one fire left for a time.
All that day, with the other man, my companion of the smoking-saloon, we clung to the davits watching the waves. Everytime we rose to the top of a wave, our hearts sank at looking into the surging valley below; when we were down, the mountain before us seemed as if it must swamp and sink us. This lasted for four days and four nights. It was a brave and a staunch little ship, and when the gale at last abated it was found that we had been driven two hundred and fifty miles south of our course. Since we had come out of the storm in safety, it was a small thing that we had nothing but pork in various forms to live upon until we got to Cape Town. The delay caused us to lose our steamer for Southampton. I, for one, however, was quite content to stay a fortnight at Cape Town and to look around.
I suppose the place is altered in thirty years. In 1867 it was a sleepy, pleasant, sunshiny town, with lovely gardens. There was a college, and there was a House of Commons, and there were the vineyards and the wine-making to see. There were plenty of people at the hotel. I called upon Mr. Southey, the Minister; he showed me the first diamond ever found in South Africa, a thing as big as the top of a child’s little finger. I attended a debate at the House, and was pleased to observe Mr. Southey’s patience with the farmers who were the members. First, he stated his case, quite clearly; then the members rose one after the other and stated that they understood nothing; Mr. Southey stated it again, in other words, quite patiently; again they got up and betrayed profound misunderstanding; a third time he put the case, always with patience and without temper, and then they began to understand.
In the evening there was always a gathering of the members at the hotel. Those who had come from England talked about the old country with affection. One of them, an old gentleman of eighty-four, who afterwards danced a hornpipe to show his agility, said that he came from Fetter Lane. I asked him if he had ever met Charles Lamb. He had not, he said, but he knew Samuel Lamb the butcher. The Afrikander Bond in these days had not been invented, and if the Dutch had begun to dream of sweeping the English into the sea, they had kept their dreams to themselves, so far as I know. It was winter, but the sun was pleasant, and the air was warm, and I left after my brief stay with real regret. We had a delightful voyage, with no bad weather at either end. We saw Ascension and landed at St. Helena, having time to drive up to Longwood and see Napoleon’s last residence. I should say that there are worse places to live in than St. Helena; it is full of flowers and the trade breeze is always cool.
And so, after six years and a half, I landed again at Southampton. The time had completely changed the whole current of my thoughts—my views of society, order, religion, everything. I went out with my head full of university and ecclesiastical prejudices. I believe that I lost them all. Gentle reader, a man who has had six years of life in a colony such as Mauritius, where all kinds of men are always coming and going, where one meets men of every station and every country, where life is carried on under conditions which cannot exist in England, may become anything you please—but if he takes to literature, he can never become a prig; nor, if he takes to politics, can he ever become the advocate of a ruling caste; nor can he pursue the old narrow views of ecclesiastical religion. He becomes more human; he has learned at least the lesson that in humanity there is no caste that is common, and none that is unclean. The unclean and the common are individual, and not general. It is a simple lesson, but it was—oh!—so very much wanted in the sixties.
Another thing that I found, and remember, is that in the colonies there are so many good fellows. There is less struggle, less posing, less intriguing, less serving of personal interest than we find at home; less envy, less jealousy, less malice; more friendliness, more hospitality, more kindliness; and less caste. Let me be always thankful for my colonial experience.
I began life again at the age of thirty-one. My capital was a pretty extensive knowledge acquired by voracious and indiscriminate reading. I could write, I knew, pretty well, having got over that difficulty of which I have spoken. I had a special branch of knowledge, in which I was not likely at that time to find many rivals, though since then the enormous increase of writers has caused an increase of competitors in every branch, including old French literature. What would happen I knew not, but of these things I was resolved—I would not go back to the Royal College of Mauritius, nor would I undertake a mastership in any English school. I was never a teacher to the manner born, nor did I ever take really kindly to the work. As regards ways and means, I had a whole twelvemonth on half-pay to look about me, and I had a few—a very few—hundreds in my pocket.
A man who goes away at four-and-twenty and comes back at one-and-thirty speedily discovers that his old place among his friends is filled up. In seven years they have gone off on different roads, they have made new associates, the old ties are broken. Moreover, in whatever direction such a man after seven years’ absence turns, he is met by the opposition and the competition of those younger than himself, who are backing up each other. Besides, it is felt that a man who goes out to a colony ought—I know not why—to remain there. Under similar circumstances, it would be now much more difficult for the returned colonial to make an opening than it was thirty years ago. I understood that my opening was to be made—somehow or other, as yet I knew not how—by literature. It was a resolution which one had to keep to oneself Everybody ridiculed it; an attempt to live by literature was considered certain dependence and beggary; indeed, there were examples in plenty to warrant that prejudice. Thirty years ago we were not far from the memory of literary Bohemia, which used to be freely painted in colours so rosy, yet was a country so full of privation, debt, duns, and dependence. I had no intention whatever of joining the Bohemians. I say that I did not quite know what I should do; but I was resolved that I would not become a publisher’s hack; that I would not hang about publishers’ offices and beg for work; nor write introductions and edit new editions at five guineas the job with a preface, an introductory life, notes, and an index thrown in. I meant to get on by means of literature and live an independent life. Understanding, as I do now, the difficulties which lay in the way before me, I am amazed when I consider the absolute confidence with which I regarded the future.
My furlough I spent in reading and in travelling about England, of which I had seen, hitherto, so very little. As regards serious work, I put together my papers, notes, and studies, and wrote a book on Early French Poetry, which was published in the autumn of 1868. The book did not profess to be a history; it was simply a collection of separate studies. It did as well as one could have expected from the nature of the subject; it introduced me to the world as a specialist who could discourse pleasantly on a subject hitherto treated, if at all in this country, by Dryasdust—I may be permitted to say so much in my own praise. There was an edition of 750 copies printed, of which a good many were satisfactorily disposed of. The arrangement was that which is humorously called “half profits,” and my share was IIs. 8d. or 8s. IId., or some such great sum. Of course I now understand what it meant; but the amount of profit in such a case mattered nothing—the advantage to me was enormous. If my publishers had made the condition that the IIs. 8d. or the 8s. IId. should be their own, I should have accepted their terms joyfully for the sake of the introduction to the public.
In June 1868 a great piece of luck came to me in the shape of a post as secretary to a society. It was exactly what I wanted; the salary was sufficient for bread and cheese, the hours were not excessive, leaving plenty of time for my own work, and the associations were eminently respectable. It was the Society for the Systematic and Scientific Exploration of Palestine. Thomson, Archbishop of York, was our chairman; our general committee contained a most imposing list of names; and on our executive committee were James Glaisher, F.R.S., afterwards chairman; W.S.W. Vaux, the numismatist; Canon Tristram, F.R.S.; Hepworth Dixon, the editor of the Athenæum—he died at Christmas 1879; James Fergusson, F.R.S., the writer on architectural history; J.L. Donaldson, professor of architecture; William Longman, publisher; Professor Hayter Lewis, architect, and successor of Professor Donaldson; Walter Morrison, M.P.; Sir George Grove, afterwards Director of the College of Music; and the Rev. F.W. Holland, who spent most of his holidays in the peninsula of Sinai.
For eighteen years I continued to be the paid secretary of this society. During that time were conducted the excavations at Jerusalem by Captain (now Sir Charles) Warren; the survey of Western Palestine by Captain (now Colonel) Conder and Captain Kitchener (now Lord Kitchener); and the Geological Survey of Palestine by Professor Hull, F.R.S.—besides the Archæological Survey by M. Clermont Ganneau. The work of the society has, in fact, completely changed the whole of the old geography, topography, and archæology of the Holy Land; it has restored to the Temple its true grandeur, and to Jerusalem its ancient splendour; it has shown the country, formerly populous and highly cultivated, dotted over with strong and great cities—Tiberias alone, which had been called a little fishing village, has been proved to have been a city with a wall as great in extent as the wall of the City of London. The work brought me into personal contact with a great number of men eminent in many ways. Among them I may mention the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, Sir Moses Montefiore, Professor Pusey, A.J. Beresford-Hope, General Charles Gordon, Laurence Oliphant, Sir Charles Wilson, Sir Charles Warren, Lord Kitchener, and Sir Richard Burton, to say nothing of many bishops, scholars, and archæologists.
I remained, as I said, as paid secretary for about eighteen years, and as honorary secretary I have remained ever since. During my official work as paid secretary I made many friends by means of the society. First and foremost among them was Edward Palmer, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. That great linguist and fine Oriental scholar explored for the society, with the late W.T. Tyrwhitt Drake, the Desert of the Wanderings. He could enter into and understand every man’s brain; he had that quick sympathy, that feminine perception of things, which make the thought-reader. No man that I ever met with in this my earthly pilgrimage has been able so profoundly to impress his personality upon his friends. He was a great scholar, yet had none of the scholarly dignity; he mostly sat telling stories and bubbling over with natural mirth. He was always doing strange and unexpected things. Once the whole town was placarded with posters, half in English, half in Arabic; again, Palmer invented a new and surprising trick which was brought out at the old Polytechnic; on another occasion he presented his friends with a volume of serious poetry; then with a burlesque; then he translated the Koran, dictating it in a sort of monotone, as if he were reading the original in a mosque. In appearance he was a remarkable being: a little man with a large head, curiously delicate features, a hand like a woman’s, eyes unnaturally bright, brown hair, and a long silky beard. When he was eighteen, being then in a City office, he was sent home to die of consumption; but he did not die; he diverted his thoughts from death by learning Arabic and Persian, but he always preserved the delicate complexion. He suffered from asthma, which hardly ever left him.
Till the age of thirty-eight or so he lived at Cambridge, lecturing, reading, teaching, examining, and picking up new languages everyday. Then a great change came upon his life. Through the failure of a cousin he became involved to the extent of some £1,500. He had not a penny; moreover, his wife was living in France—or rather dying in France—which obliged him to keep up a separate establishment and to be running over to Paris continually to look after her. He made an arrangement with his creditors. He assigned to them his fellowship and professorship—about £400 a year—until they should be paid in full, and he came to London penniless, but full of confidence. He became a leader-writer for the Standard, and there was never any further trouble about money except that he always spent everything as fast as it came in. In 1882, when the trouble with Egypt began, and the Suez Canal was threatened, he undertook for the Government a journey in the Sinai Desert in order to keep the Arabs quiet. He went out alone; disguised as a Syrian Effendi, he travelled through the desert in the height of the summer heat; he saw sheikh after sheikh, and made them promise not to harm the canal; he arrived safely at Suez, his mission accomplished. He had, however, to take some money to his new allies, and was treacherously murdered by a party of Arabs sent from Cairo for the purpose. The murder, like everything else that belongs to Palmer’s history, had in it all the elements of the picturesque, the weird, and the wonderful. The party were caught in the night, and all night long the captors discussed what should be done with their prisoners. They were afraid of murdering them for some reason; probably Palmer’s guides filled them with terror, telling them how great a man was the Effendi Abdullah, what a power among the Sinai Arabs, what a scholar. But at last their obedience to their chiefs overcame terror. They ran upon Palmer with swords, and threw his bleeding body over the crags and rocks into the valley below. And so they treated his companions Gill and Charrington. Sir Charles Warren, sent out for the purpose, hunted down and hanged everyone of the murderers. Palmer’s portrait hangs in the hall of St. John’s College, Cambridge, but I fear that his history is no longer remembered by the undergraduates.
Let me give here a certain elegy which I wrote for the Rabelais Club of which Palmer was a member:—
THE DEATH OF THE SHEIKH ABDULLAH.
“The blood-red dawn rolls westward; crag and steep
Welcome the splendid day with purple glow;
Through the dim gorges shape and outline creep,
And deeper seem the black depths far below.
“Earth hath no wilder place her lands among;
Here is no cool green spot, no pleasant thing;
No shade of lordly bough, no sweet birds’ song,
No gracious meadows, and no flowers of spring.
“The eagle builds his eyrie on these peaks;
Below the jackal and hyena prowl:
No gentle creature here her pasture seeks,
But fiery serpents lurk, and vulture foul.
“I see a figure, where the rock sinks sheer
Into a gorge too deep for noontide sun;
Above, the sky of morning pure and clear—
Others are there, but I see only one.
“In Syrian robes, like some old warrior free,
After fierce fight a captive, so he stands,
Gazing his last—sweet are the skies to see,
And sweet the sunshine breaking o’er the lands.
“Then, while the light of wrath prophetic fills
His awful eyes, he hurls among his foes—
Wild echoes ringing round the ’frighted hills—
A flaming prophecy of helpless woes.
“Yea; like a Hebrew Prophet doth he tell
Of swift revenge and death and women’s moan;
And stricken babes and burning pains of hell.
Then each man’s traitor heart fell cold as stone.
“And through their strong limbs fearful tremblings crept,
And brown cheeks paled, and down dropped every head;
Then, with a last fierce prophecy he leaped.
*****
My God! Abdullah—Palmer—art thou dead?”
A society such as the Palestine Exploration Fund naturally attracts all the cranks, especially the religious cranks. There was one man who was a mixture of geographical science and of religious crankiness. He claimed to be the son of the founder of the Plymouth Brethren; he had vast ideas on the rebuilding of Babylon, that it might once more become the geographical centre of European and Asiatic trade. As a matter of fact we only have to consider the position of Babylon in order to understand that when the country is taken over by a European Power, and the valley of the Euphrates is once more drained and cultivated, that great city will again revive. But with this insight he mixed up a queer religion, in which Nimrod played a great part. He would talk about Nimrod as long as I allowed him. And then I heard of a grand project in which he was concerned. It was nothing less than the cutting of a sea-canal from the northern end of the Gulf of Akaba to the south of the Dead Sea; this canal would flood the Jordan valley and create a large central lake over that valley extending for some miles on either hand. Then, with a short railway across Galilee, there would be a new waterway, with possible extension by rail and canal to Persia and India. The project was seriously considered; a meeting was held in the office of the Palestine Exploration Fund, at which the then Duke of Sutherland and others consulted Sir Charles Warren and Captain Conder on the possibility of constructing the canal. The duke could not, or would not, be persuaded that a cutting for so many miles of seven hundred feet deep at least would be practically impossible. I think there must have been some political business at the back of the project, of which, however, nothing more was heard.
The man who could read all ancient inscriptions by means of the original alphabet, entirely constructed of equilateral triangles, was amusing at first but became tedious. The man who saw “Nature Worship,” to use the common euphemism, in everything ancient also became tedious. The man who wanted the society to send out an expedition to Ararat for the recovery of the Ark, was extremely interesting. The Ark, it seems, is lying embedded in ice and snow on the top of that mountain; all we have to do is to blow up the ice with dynamite, when the Ark will be revealed. The man who knew where to lay his hand upon the Ark of the Covenant, if we would send him out for the purpose, was perhaps a knave, perhaps a crank. But crankery and knavery sometimes overlap. The man who knew where the monks buried their treasure on the fall of the Latin Kingdom was also perhaps knave and perhaps crank. He had got hold of an Italian book about buried treasure in Palestine, and believed it.
Then there was a man who had a road upon his mind. It is a road in Eastern Palestine, which has milestones upon it, and is a well constructed road, and starts right into the desert. Where does it go? He was always inquiring about this road; and indeed it is a very curious thing that the road, mentioned by Gibbon, should have been so carefully constructed, and one would really like to know where it goes. The man who could prove that Mount Sinai is not Hor and that the survey of the Sinai peninsula was therefore a useless piece of work, wrote a book about it, and so relieved his mind. He was an interesting man; he had been an army surgeon in the Crimea; then he became a barrister, and got into notice by defending the prisoner charged with the Clerkenwell explosion; then he became a leader-writer for the Morning Post, with this fad about Mount Sinai to keep him in a wholesome condition of excitement and interest. I know not how many converts he made, but I think, for my own part, that he was perhaps right.
In the course of my work at the Palestine Exploration Society I was connected officially with one great discovery and one great fraud. The discovery was that of the Moabite Stone—an event which forced the world to acknowledge the historical character of part, at least, of the Old Testament. The discovery was made by a German missionary employed by an English society. Being in English employment, he communicated his discovery to the German Court. At the same time M. Clermont Ganneau, then chancelier of the French Consulate, heard of it, and Warren heard of it. Negotiations were briskly begun; but the Arabs, in the end, thinking that it was a magical stone, since so many Europeans wanted to get it, broke it to pieces. Then Warren procured squeezes of the inscription, which were sent home. These precious documents we had photographed. The treasurer of the society, Mr. Walter Morrison, kindly shared with me the task of watching the work in the photographer’s studio, because we were afraid of letting the documents go out of our sight and our hands. When we had our photographs, the squeezes became less valuable. We sent copies round to the best known Hebrew scholars, and all began to write books and monographs. We found a great quantity of things in the course of our excavations and our surveys, but never again did we make so splendid a “find” as that of the Moabite Stone.
Some years later—I think about 1877—a certain Shapira, a Polish Jew converted to Christianity but not to good works, came to England and called upon me mysteriously. He had with him, he said, a document which would simply make students of the Bible and Hebrew scholars reconsider their ways; it would throw a flood of light upon the Pentateuch; and so on. The man was a good actor; he was a man of handsome presence, tall, with fair hair and blue eyes; not the least like the ordinary Polish Jew, and with an air of modest honesty which carried one away. What was his discovery? First he would not tell me. Then I said that he might go away. So he told me. It was nothing less than a contemporary copy of the book of Deuteronomy written on parchment. A contemporary copy! Could I see it? I might see a piece, which he pulled out of his pocket-book. It was written in fine black ink, as fresh after three thousand years as when it was laid on; and in the Phœnician characters of the Moabite Stone. It had been preserved, he told me, through being deposited in a perfectly dry cave in Moab. Then I suggested that he should make this discovery known to the world. He consented, after a while, to reveal it to two persons. Dr. Ginsburg, the great Hebrew scholar, and Captain Conder, the Surveyor of Western Palestine. I undertook to invite them to come on the morrow. But Ginsburg considered that the invitation included his friends, and so the whole of the British Museum, so to speak, with all the Hebrew scholars in London, turned up, and with them Conder. Shapira unfolded his MS. amid such excitement as is very seldom exhibited by scholars. The exposition lasted about three hours; then Shapira tore off a piece of the precious document to show the nature of the parchment. It was, as one of the company remarked, wonderfully modern in appearance, and a remarkable illustration of the arts as known and practised in the time of Moses. Then Shapira withdrew; and after a little conversation the learned company separated. As they went out, one of them, a professor of Hebrew, exclaimed with conviction, “This is one of the few things which could not be a forgery and a fraud!”
There were left with me Captain Conder and William Simpson, of the Illustrated London News. Said Simpson dryly, “He values his MS. at a million. Of course he could spare the value of the bit he tore off. I suppose it is worth £500.” So he chuckled and went his way. Simpson entertained a low view of the worthy Shapira, Christian convert. Then Conder, who had been very quiet, only putting in a little question from time to time, spoke. “I observe,” he said, “that all the points objected to by German critics have vanished in this new and epoch-making trouvaille. The geography is not confused, and Moses does not record his own death.”
“Well?” I asked, for more was in his face.
“And I know, I believe, all the caves of Moab, and they are all damp and earthy. There is not a dry cave in the country.”
“Then you think——?”
“Precisely.”
Clermont Ganneau, who was in Paris, came over to see the precious MS. A few days passed; the learned divines and professors were hanging over the MS. preparing their commentaries. Ganneau asked permission to see the MS., and then all the fat was in the fire. “I know,” he said, “how this MS. was obtained. The parchment is cut from the margins of Hebrew manuscripts, some of them of considerable antiquity. The writing is that of yesterday.”
Alas! that was so. That was exactly what had been done. Shapira received his MS. back without any offer of a hundred pounds, not to speak of a million. It was too much for the poor man; the work had cost him so much trouble, he had reckoned with so much faith on the success of his careful and learned forgery, that his mind became unhinged. He hanged himself. I believe that the disappointment of the Hebrew scholars, who had begun learned books on the newly discovered text, was pitiful. Shapira left with me, and it was never reclaimed, the leaden cover of Samson’s coffin. Yes, nothing less than the coffin of Samson Agonistes, Samson the strong, Samson the victim of woman’s wiles. Shapira said that he was not absolutely certain about it; he should be most sorry to mislead; the truth was that he could not be sure; but there was on the leaden roll the name, nowhere else occurring in Hebrew literature: the actual name of Samson in Phœnician characters—plain for all to read.
There were many more days of discovery and murmured discovery; arrivals of drawings, copies of inscriptions, statuettes, and other things, all of which kept that quiet office alive. Conder discovered old towns and sites by fifties; Ganneau found the head of the Roman statue set up by the Romans on the site of the Holy of Holies; he also found the stone of the Temple warning strangers not to cross the barrier on pain of death. Gordon found, as he thought, the true place of the Crucifixion; and there was always running on the old controversy about the sacred site. For my part I have always agreed with Conder that when a site is accepted by tradition common to Christian, Jew, and Moslem, that site is probably correct; the excavations and discoveries made on the site of the traditional Holy Sepulchre continually furnished new arguments in favour of that tradition, and history seems to me to be entirely on that side.
As we wanted as much history as we could get, I created a small society among the people interested in these things for the translation and publication of the ancient pilgrimages. We had about one hundred and twenty members. One translation was done by Aubrey Stewart, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Guy L’Estrange, Conder, and one or two more helped; Sir Charles Wilson annotated the books. In about ten years we accomplished the task that we had set before us in our original prospectus—we had translated the writings of all the old pilgrims. I am quite sure that no society ever before did so much with so small an income. To be sure, we had no office clerks to pay; and our work was mostly gratuitous. I have always been proud of my share in creating this subsidiary society and in producing this series. The work will certainly never be done again. There were so few copies—not more than two hundred, I believe—that our labours are practically unknown except to those who study the topography, the geography, and the buildings of the Holy Land.
The work of the main society all this time was going on quietly. I had organised a system of local societies all over the country, and had sent lecturers to explain what we were doing. Consequently I was enabled to supply our party in Palestine with ample funds. The survey cost in round figures £200 a month; and when Clermont Ganneau went out for us on a special archæological mission, he wanted about £100 a month more. The public interest in our proceedings was maintained by the publication of the society’s quarterly journal. There were, however, naturally times of doubt and trouble. Thus, in 1874—when I had to find all the money month by month, to translate Ganneau’s voluminous and highly technical memoirs, to edit the journal and to receive all the visitors—I was married. This event took place in October. Three days before my wedding I received a note from Messrs. Coutts & Co. Two bills had been presented—one from Conder and the other from Ganneau—amounting together to about £300 more than we had in the bank. What was to be done? Most of my people were out of town. One man lent me £50, another £25, I could spare £75, and so on. I went down into the country at last with the comfortable assurance that these bills, at least, would be met. But what was to happen next? My own honeymoon, which I had planned for three weeks, was curtailed to less than a week, and I came back to the empty exchequer with a good deal of anxiety. But the local societies poured in their contributions; the next bills were met; the advances were repaid; and I went on with furnishing a modest semi-detached house at Shepherd’s Bush.
The secretaryship of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a small thing which began at £200 a year and after a few years was increased to £300, was the cause—the sole cause—which enabled me to realise my dream of a literary life without dependence, and therefore without degradation. I shall go on in the next chapters to show how I realised that dream. At present I would only note the broad fact that never at anytime was I dependent on my pen for a subsistence. Until my marriage my salary was just sufficient to enable me to live in reasonable comfort. Therefore I was in easy circumstances, comparatively. There was no pressing need for me to write; I could afford to give time to things. Moreover, although my office hours were supposed to be from ten to four, as a rule, except in one or two years, there was not enough work to occupy a quarter of the time. To be sure, visitors came in and wasted the time. But almost everyday I had the greater part of the morning to myself. After the letters had been answered I could carry on my own work in a perfectly quiet office, I could give the afternoon to visitors, and from four till seven I was again free to carry on my work without interruption in my chambers.
I would urge upon everybody who proposes to make a bid for literary success to do so with some backing—a mastership in a school, a Civil Service clerkship, a post as secretary to some institution or society; anything, anything, rather than dependence on the pen, and the pen alone.